And of course there's the MAJOR point that wasn't touched on all that much: THAT MIKE HUCKABEE IS USING RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTS TO ARGUE AGAINST A CIVIL CONCEPT! Nobody is working to change his Baptist faith's views on marriage (or a 6,000-year-old world). Nobody is telling ordained minister Huckabee that he has to pronounce any two dudes husband and husband. Nobody is stopping him from daydreaming about Beezlebub's backyard barbecue, at which roasted homo is the main course. But yet he is using all these reasons as his primary basis for his arguments. IT'S. JUST. PLAIN. ILLOGICAL!

But fantastic job, Stewart. Your Jon may be h-less, but your back in certainly not sans spine.

Your thoughts

I'm not sure a lot of people really understand what civil marriage is. I think they really do think that legalizing same-sex "marriage" means same-sex marriage in the churches. Shouldn't we work to make the distinction a little clearer? I feel like it's kind of the lynchpin that is keeping a number of people from really getting behind the cause, and I think it's one area where the Prop 8 campaign may have failed.

Posted by: Eric | Dec 10, 2008 8:56:37 AM

Agree fully, Eric. Our leadership has not done a good job of this AT ALL.

It's actually one HUGE problem I have with Barack Obama's marriage stance. He's repeatedly said how we should hand the word "marriage" over to the churches. This, of course, supposes that the word is always connected to religion to begin with, which to me only serves to muddy the issue in the public's mind.

"Words do matter. Definitions do matter. [...] The basic purpose of a marriage is not just to create the next generation, but to train our replacements."

First of all, ew. What a warm way to think of a family, not as a group of loved ones, but as a very tiny battalion. After all, this is Sparta (oops! I mean America), and that's just how we do.

Also, I happened to go look up the word "marriage" over at the Oxford English Dictionary website, and guess what? They've already changed the definition of marriage! What an ordeal. Did you guys feel the earth quake the moment it happened? That was the shiver of society ripping apart at the seams. It's weird, I actually thought that words were just man-made and malleable tools of communication, not the unchanging sacred stones of eternity. I've been so blind.

Jeezy creezy- Huckabee was so smarmy and offered no real arguments, just dusty old myths. I h8 Huckabee.

Jon Stewart is truly a friend of the LGBT community. He stands up for us when others don't.

Huckabee also claimed that marriage is a "privilege" not a right. I don't know about other states, but in California courts have long ruled that marriage is a RIGHT. As such, the state cannot deny marriage to a mass murderer serving life in prison (as long as it's an opposite-sex marriage). But law-abiding citizens who happen to be gay...

Civil vs. religious marriage is one problem, but the majority of people I talk to have the same ideological problem as Mr. Huckabee: they believe that people choose to be gay, and that gay sex is unnatural and perverted. These are the myths that we have to dispel with before any real change can happen.